Photoshop CS6 The Missing Manual

A useful reference for anyone using the program as it covers what all of the different options that the program has available actually do.

My Rating:

Pros

Covers all the options the program offers, grouping them together based on their use.

Has sections that cover the different ways in which the program can be used not just for manipulating existing images but also for creating new ones.

Test files for all the examples are available to download.

Cons

The book states that the appendices are on the web but the web site it refers you to just says "Coming Soon".

As actually installing the program is one of the most difficult aspects of using Photoshop, the fact that the book doesn't cover this at all when it is supposed to be the "missing manual" is a major flaw.

Description

First Edition: Copyright May 2012

862 page paperback

Published by O'Reilly Media

ISBN 978-1-449-31615-0

Author Lesa Snider

Review

This is a useful book for anyone who has been using Photoshop for a while who wants to learn what else it can do. The way that the main sections are laid out easily demonstrates just what sorts of things that the program is capable of doing so that you can easily see what other things it can do that you haven't even attempted yet. The individual chapters within each section then form a useful references as to just how you can use the software to do any or all of the different things associated with that particular graphics task. Where the software provides multiple ways to do something the book explains each of the alternatives from the most straightforward to the most flexible.

The biggest failing that this book has is the missing appendices. One of these appendices is supposed to cover how to install Photoshop in the first place - something that you'd need to do before being able to make use of any of the information in the book. That the book is missing the information on how to install the software makes it absolutely useless to anyone who doesn't already have the software installed.

I didn't have this particular version of photoshop installed on my computer and had been planning to download the trial version from Abode to try out some of the new commands mentioned in the book. Unfortunately the current Adobe install process is so convoluted that I couldn't even get their installer to install properly - when I went to the book for help it referred me to an appendix on the web that doesn't yet exist.